Complete Coverage of the 219th American Astronomical Society Meeting

SPACE.com Staff | January 12, 2012 10:00am ET

This artist's concept depicts the newfound planetary system KOI-961, which contains three alien planets smaller than Earth. The exoplanets circle their red-dwaf host star at very close distances, so they're likely too hot to host life. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

More than 2,700 astronomers from around the world are convening in Austin, Texas from Jan. 8-12 to discuss the latest discoveries from space at the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS).

The meeting will feature the newest findings about some of the biggest mysteries of the cosmos, including dark matter, dark energy, alien planets, and more.

SPACE.com's Clara Moskowitz and Denise Chow will provide complete coverage from the 219th AAS meeting. You can track the conference on Twitter by following Clara (@ClaraMoskowitz) and Denise (@denisechow) and by following the hash tag #AAS219.

This chart compares the smallest known alien planets to Mars and Earth. Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler space telescope announced the discovery of KOI-961.01, KOI-961.02 and KOI-961.03 on Jan. 11, 2012; the Kepler team announced Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f in December 2011.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

3 Alien Planets Smaller Than Earth Found
Astronomers have discovered the three smallest alien planets yet, including one that's just the size of Mars. The alien worlds, detected using publicly available data from NASA's Kepler mission, are 0.78, 0.73 and 0.57 times the diameter of Earth, respectively; the smallest one is roughly Mars-size.

160 Billion Alien Planets May Exist in Our Milky Way Galaxy
Alien planets are incredibly common in our Milky Way galaxy, outnumbering stars by a large margin, a new study suggests. On average, each of the 100 billion or so stars in our galaxy hosts at least 1.6 planets, according to the study, bringing the number of likely alien worlds to more than 160 billion.

Film still from 'Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope' showing the sunset on the planet Tatooine. Credit: Twentieth Century Fox/LucasFilm

Real-Life 'Tatooine': New 'Star Wars'-Like Planets with 2 Suns Found
Astronomers have found more real-life versions of Luke Skywalker's home planet Tatooine from "Star Wars" — alien worlds that see two suns rise and set each day instead of one. And these two newfound worlds are also extremely close to the habitable zones of their parent stars, scientists say.

This picture of the galaxy cluster ACT-CL J0102-4915 combines images taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope with images from the SOAR Telescope and X-ray observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The X-ray image shows the hot gas in the cluster and is shown in blue. This newly discovered galaxy cluster has been nicknamed El Gordo — the "big" or "fat one" in Spanish. It consists of two separate galaxy subclusters colliding at several million kilometres per hour, and is so far away that its light has travelled for seven billion years to reach the Earth. Credit: ESO/SOAR/NASA

Three views of Venus' solar transit in 2004, taken by NASA's sun-observing TRACE spacecraft. The top image is in visible light; the view on bottom left is in the ultraviolet, and the one on bottom right is in the extreme ultraviolet.Credit: NASA/LMSAL